Talks

These are slides, notes, and now movies (!) from various talks I’ve given. Not all of my talks are represented here, but many are. Files are in PDF format, and more or less reverse-chronologically ordered.

Pieri Maps and the bound Young quiver, based upon joint work with Ragnar-Olaf Buchweitz and Michel Van den Bergh, given at the Louisville KY AMS meeting in October 2013 and at the Winter Meeting of the Canadian Math Society in Toronto in December 2013.

I gave three talks at MSRI in January/February 2013. They were recorded on video! I’m a star!

What should a non-commutative desingularization be? [.m4v (282M), .mov (408M)]

Wild hypersurfaces, based on joint work with Andrew Crabbe, given at the AMS meeting in Notre Dame, November 2010. I gave a similar talk at the AMS meeting in Lincoln NE, October 2011. Here are notes for an hour-long version, given as seminar talks in Lawrence (Feb 2010) and Syracuse (April 2010).

What is a non-commutative desingularization?, a colloquium lecture at the University of Nebraska in September 2008. The first half is mostly pretty pictures and little mathematical content, then the technicality-level jumps significantly. Possibly not a great approach. (Note: the file is about 4MB, due to all the included images.)

Non-commutative desingularization of determinantal varieties, a longer talk than usual (40 minutes) on the usual topic, containing more history and motivation than usual. Given at the international conference on commutative algebra in Yokohama, Japan, March 2008. updated: the file now contains some of the notes I made to myself for the lecture. Maybe that will be interesting to some.

The McKay Correspondence (coming soon). I gave a series of three seminar talks consisting of a very leisurely introduction to the MC, with emphasis on contributions of Auslander and on my current research. The notes need some fairly serious tidying up, but will appear here eventually. updated (March 08): looks like I won’t get around to tidying that file anytime soon, so here’s the un-tidy version: Notes on the McKay Correspondence.

Coxeter-Dynkin Diagrams: A, D, and E, at the 32nd Annual New York State Regional Graduate Mathematics Conference. This is a purely expository, purely elementary talk aimed at first-year grad students. It was intended to give just a glimpse of the mysteries surrounding the Dynkin diagrams, in two of the contexts they arise naturally. Some will recognize parts of this talk as borrowed (with gratitude) from Idun Reiten’s colloquium lecture in Berkeley back in 2003.

The Banach–Tarski Paradox, given in the Student Analysis Seminar at Syracuse, 31 January 2006. This was great fun to do. I basically reported on Stan Wagon’s book on the subject, emphasizing the algebraic aspects of the proof of BTP and its analytic consequences.

Factoring the adjoint and MCM modules, an extended abstract for the hour-long talk I gave at the Oberwolfach workshop “Kommutative Algebra” in April 2005. People seemed really to like this talk, which made me very happy.

Factoring the adjoint and modules over the generic determinant, a 20-minute talk that I gave at the Joint Meetings of the AMS in Atlanta, January 2005. The main reason I typed these slides, instead of hand-writing them, is that I wanted to see if I could pull off the typesetting on page 2 with horizontal curly-braces. I gave essentially the same talk at the AMS Special Session in Representations of Algebras in Santa Barbara, April 2005.

Finite type: recurring examples, an hour-long “plenary lecture” at the Nebraska Regional Workshop in Mathematics, November 2001. I seem to have misplaced the graphs that went with the talk, so you’ll have to fill in the A-D-E plane curve singularities yourself.